Monday, September 30, 2013

The Will Calendars at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland provides a fully searchable index to the will calendar entries
for the three District Probate Registries of Armagh, Belfast and Londonderry,
with the facility to view the entire will calendar entry for each successful
search. The database covers the period 1858-1919 and 1922-1943. Part of 1921
has been added, with remaining entries for 1920-1921 to follow in the near
future.

Digitised images of entries
from the copy will books covering the period 1858-1900 are now available online,
allowing users to view the full content of a will. 93,388 will images are now
available to view.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Scottish Soldiers Wills are scheduled to come online in 2014 as part of the commemoration of World War 1. The wills consist of special forms removed from soldiers' pay books, other army
forms, or other documents. They are generally very brief and do not mention
individual possessions. They contain limited personal or service history
information.
About 31,000 wills survive, of which approximately 26,000 date from the First
World War (WW I) and 4,700 from the Second World War (WW II). The rest belong to
the period between 1857 and 1966. The wills were written by men up to the rank
of warrant officer. About 100 wills exist of officers who were commissioned from
the rank during WW I, and a few from WWII. There are wills of some Royal Flying
Corps (RFC) and Royal Air Force (RAF) personnel from WW I, and of six women
serving with the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) during World War II.
The soldiers' wills belong to a special series among the records of
the Edinburgh Commissary Office, which received them from the War Office because
the men were domiciled in Scotland. Most were not recorded in the commissary
registers of the Commissary Office and the sheriff courts.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Rudy's List of Archaic Medical Terms is a collection of archaic medical terms and their old and modern
definitions. The primary focus of this web site is to help decipher the Causes
of Death found on Mortality Lists, Certificates of Death and Church Death
Records from the 19th century and earlier. The web site is updated often and as new
information is received, with the intention of collecting and recording old medical terms
in all European languages. The English and German lists are the most extensive
to date. If you are having trouble decoding the medical language used to describe causes of death then the Archaic Medical Terms website may help you.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

The World War 1 Military Conscription Appeals series contains 11,000 case papers from the Middlesex Appeal
Tribunal which, between 1916 and 1918, heard appeals from men who had previously
applied to a local tribunal for exemption from compulsory military service. The
reasons provided by applicants are varied, with applications made on moral
grounds (conscientious objectors), on medical grounds (disability), on family
grounds (looking after dependents) and on economic grounds (preserving a
business). The vast majority of cases relate to the impact of war on a man’s
family or their business interests, and the papers reveal some fascinating and
tragic stories.

Due to the sensitive issues that surrounded compulsory military service during
and after the First World War, only a small minority of the tribunal papers
survive. In the years that followed the end of the war, the Government issued
instructions to the Local Government Boards that all tribunal material should be
destroyed, except for the Middlesex Appeal records and a similar set for Lothian
and Peebles in Scotland, which were to be retained as a benchmark for possible
future use. A sample of records from the Central Tribunal were also retained,
which are also part of the series.

Monday, September 16, 2013

The Western Front Association (WFA) has announced that it has
secured the safe storage and preservation of over six million
Great War soldiers' pension record cards after learning that the Ministry of Defence was no
longer able to retain and manage this archive. There was a possibility that the records would have had to be destroyed
unless they could be passed for safe keeping to a reputable organisation. The
WFA has made a study and catalogued the primary information for
of each group of records in the archive, and arranged the safe transfer and
storage of the records to the WFA's secure premises.During the Great War, dependents of each serving British soldier, sailor,
airman and nurse who was killed were entitled to a pension, as were those
service personnel who were wounded or otherwise incapacitated due to the
conflict. There is a card for each. These cards are categorised as follows:

Other Ranks Died (this contains nearly one million individual records)

Widows and Dependents of Other Ranks Died (in excess of one million
records)

Thursday, September 12, 2013

In England, wills fall into two main categories - pre-1858 and post-1858. Pre-1858 wills were probated in one of two principal courts for England and Wales - the Prerogative Court of Canterbury in the south, searchable at www.discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk and the Prerogative Court of York in the north, searchable at www.britishorigins.com. Below these were other levels of ecclesiastical courts, including what were known as peculiars.
Post-1858 wills were proved at the Principal Probate Registry, established 12 January 1858, and can be searched on Ancestry. Copies of wills can be ordered at a cost.

Monday, September 9, 2013

Police officers in the Essex County Constabulary from the 1880s to present
day

Police officers who served in the Colchester Borough Police and transferred
to the Essex County Constabulary in 1947

Police officers serving in Southend Borough Police 1914 - 1969

Police War Reserves - World War II

Women Police Auxiliaries - World War II

These indexes will provide basic details concerning an
individual, such as date/place of birth, dates of service, commendations,
misconducts, sickness, training, pay, reason for leaving and rank held. Basic information is free, full records incur a cost.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

The records of thousands of 19th century immigrants to Britain are now
available to search and
download online. The collection, which covers the period 1801 to 1871,
includes records relating to more than 7,000 people who applied to become
British citizens under the 1844 Naturalisation Act, as well as a small number of
papers relating to denization, a form of British citizenship that conferred some
but not all the rights of a British subject.
Applicants were required under the act to present a memorial to the Secretary
of State at the Home Office stating their age, trade and duration of
residence. These papers are now available
online for the first time.
They include a rich mix of individuals from across the world, including a
large number of immigrants from French and German states, as well as Belgium,
Holland, Switzerland, Spain, Russia, Poland, Sweden and the Italian states.

The majority settled in London, establishing immigrant communities, such as
'Little Italy' in Clerkenwell, which still exist today. Many Italian immigrants
were ice cream makers, plasterers, confectioners, restaurateurs, and shop
keepers, while many German immigrants settled in the East End of London working
in the sugar refineries and in the meat and baking trades.

The National Library of Australia’s digitised newspapers currently has over
10 million pages from over 500 Australian newspapers online. All of these
digitised newspapers are fully text-searchable, and users can enhance the data
by subject tagging, text correction and annotations (have you done that?). And
of course the newspapers are FREE for everyone to use and browse.